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In Part 3a of the Cloud Optimized Storage Solution series, I covered the concept of data tiering within the COSS solution. In this particular post, I’m going to start the conversation on how SLAs may tie into the overall concept of data tiering as well as infrastructure access SLAs. This particular post is more of a “working edition” than anything else, so, comments are certainly welcome and warranted.

Service Level Agreements provide additional frameworks for data storage and access along with particular sensitivities to the methodology of access as driven by compliance. Understandably this subject is very broad in scope so, for the purpose of clarity, focus will be given to two basic SLA metrics: data storage and data access. These SLAs serve two purposes: to structure the type of relationship between a customer and their data within the cloud and provide a legal framework whereby customer and provider realize risks/benefits and provide remediation.

Earlier this morning, Scott Lowe posed the following question: What if hypervisors shared a file system? The concept here is that most hypervisors (notably VMware and [soon] Hyper-V) have a clustered file system that is used to extend the capabilities of a group of hypervisors into such things as dynamic resource sharing, failover/failback, HA, etc. The natural extention of this, when looked at from a longitudinal viewpoint, is extending the same basic model into the cloud.